Wednesday, April 10, 2013

For the love of the dead: embalming in New Zealand.

David
Mahuika touches death on a daily basis. Stripped of scrubs and face mask, now
wearing a pin-striped suit and blood red tie, the embalmer-in-training has left
his patient upstairs on the table. Except, here they are not patients. They are
called “our people”, considered friends who are visiting and treated with the
utmost respect...

David was told by a mentor: you
don’t become an embalmer; you're born one and remembers as a small child his
first connection to the profession. “When I was about five or six I had to go to a
funeral. We were standing right in front of the coffin. I wasn’t really looking
at the person – I was looking at the shiny handles. That’s what caught my eye
and I thought, ‘Those look neat! Shiny handles. Oh, that box looks really
shiny.’ I looked up and said to my mother, ‘That box is shiny.’ And she said,
‘Shh!’ It was set in me from that time on, I think.”

The ambition caught up with him
again in his teenage years, where he says he was called into it. “At college they had career advisers and
they’d come out to the classrooms and give you a sheet of all the different job
opportunities. One of them had embalming written on it. I was sitting next to
my friend and I said, ‘I’m gonna do that!’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Embalming!
I want to be an embalmer.’ He said, ‘What’s that?’”

Embalmers are in essence, trades
people, carrying out preservation and restorative procedures on deceased
humans. “It’s like plumbing through the whole body,” explains Mahuika.
“Basically it’s like a blood transfusion. We’re removing all the blood and
putting chemicals back into the body to preserve it. I’ll leave it at that.” A
polite smile crosses his lips. A more thorough explanation would be this: micro-organisms
are responsible for a person’s decomposition following death. This is due to
the organisms feeding off proteins. Embalming fluid acts on the proteins,
killing the organisms and sanitising the cadaver. The common carotid artery is
raised, usually on the right side of the neck, along with the corresponding
jugular vein and a cannula is inserted into the artery to drain the blood. An
embalming solution is then injected, spreading from the head to fingers, knees to
toes.

Although there are alternatives to
embalming these can create problems in the time frame before burial or
cremation occurs. Depending on factors surrounding a person’s death, each body
has a different decomposition rate. Where one person can last two or three days
without any discolouration and leaking, another will start the natural process
much more rapidly, often within hours. One alternative is ‘soft embalming’
where only the visceral organs, such as the heart, lungs and liver are
injected with embalming fluid. This is because some people find the straight
preservation procedure too invasive. It also makes the skin and muscles feel
natural rather than chemically effected. Refrigeration is also an option but
this prolongs decomposition for only so long. President of the New Zealand
Embalmer’s Association (NZEA), Wade Downey, says they only refrigerate a body
when requested, as the health and safety benefits of embalming remain
paramount. This is not only for those working with the deceased but for family
wanting to view their loved one in the days following death.

A straight embalm takes around an
hour to an hour and a half. However, these days few cases are that simple. Mahuika
shares: “Many of the people coming in have oedema, which is excessive fluid in
the tissue. A lot of people have that, possibly because of the different types
of medication that they’re on. With oedema you can’t afford to break the tissue
of the skin because the body will just keep leaking. That’s where your skills
and training are going to come out. It has to be preservation over presentation,
first and foremost.”

Downey says while there have always
been requests for no embalming, people in the profession are becoming more
educated to ask why. Health and safety factors are a huge priority in any
funeral home where embalmers wear scrubs, knee-high gumboots, surgical gloves
and serious face masks - not flimsy white ones but those of industrial, hard
plastic attire. A sign inside the Davis Funeral Services mortuary door reminds
staff as they exit “Have you washed your hands?” Death can be a health hazard.

The first natural cemetery for New
Zealand opened in Wellington two-years-ago. It is part of an ecological
movement advocating natural burials - zero chemicals involved, down to the
caskets. No MDF, no glues, no embalmed bodies. The ecological view is against
embalming substances used - especially Formaldehyde and other pollutants which
remain in the soil after decomposition. Many funeral homes are backing this
idea by providing alternative options for coffins, using untreated pine and
unbleached calico. Some would ask if this is enough though and whether the
embalming process takes away from the normal breaking-down of the body that
occurs after death. Not only that, but if the majority of dead are embalmed before burial, does this
mean that cemeteries around the country are quietly harbouring toxins
detrimental to our future generation’s well being?

Ironically, the eco-friendly
cemetery and the establishment that trains embalmers are in close proximity.
The Wellington Institute of Technology (WelTec) offers a 15-month National
Certificate in Embalming. Subjects studied include anatomy, pathology and
microbiology. Students also learn about the historical development of mortuary
practices. This year 23 trainees are studying the certificate at different
levels. Course programme manager Michael Wolffram is seeing an increased amount
of people interested in the industry. He believes this is because of the
changing dynamics in New Zealand’s funeral culture and those changes as
distinct to our nation. “All countries have a variety of culture around their
rituals of farewell. New Zealand now has its own flavour,” he says.Applicants to the course must be at
least 20-years-old. Wolffram knows of many risks involved in the industry and
surmises that younger people do not always consider the mental and physical
choices they will face as an embalmer. “There needs to be maturity when
deciding on a career like this; some life skills. The exposure to some of the
things we see needs to be handled correctly. Many people working in the funeral
industry deal with cases that have parallels in their own lives. This has an
impact,” he explains. Mahuika agrees. “It’s not a
profession that younger people think about because they’re too busy having a
good time. But embalmers are few and far between so there is a need for more.
In the past it has traditionally been a male dominated profession [in New
Zealand] but now there are more women coming through and that’s a good thing.”

Wolffram counters this humorously
with a comment that throughout history women from cultures around the world
have had the role of what he coins “hatchers and dispatchers”.

Understandably dealing with the
dead wouldn’t be on everyone’s Top Five list of career choices. There are many
stigmas attached to the embalming profession. Downey says he has seen some
strange characters come in with their CV. “Some people have a natural morbid
curiosity but they stand out straight away. Historical movies or programmes
haven’t helped. The kind where funeral directors were represented as
undertakers, and embalmers were called morticians. It’s old school, old
fashioned. It draws visions of a man with a top hat and a tape measure around
his neck...not a good look.”

Stigmas aside, there are other
unusual work place difficulties that embalmers face. Situations not thought of
Mahuika delicately points out. “Some families bring in beautiful clothes for
their loved one, and I mean these are clothes they wore maybe 20-years-ago. Now
their loved one has put on a little bit of weight...” Perhaps people don’t
realise that embalmers do more than just preserve a body.

They wash the body. Dress the body.
Apply cosmetics to the body. “It’s amazing the reaction that you will get from
different families,” Mahuika smiles. “Some of them will hug you; some of
them will kiss you. That gives me a lot of job satisfaction. The fact that I’ve
looked after their loved one; I’ve taken care of them. This is a good
profession that gets a lot of respect.”

Mahuika has experienced the more
morose questions time and time again but shrugs them off unfazed. “People
always ask if I get scared. I tell them, no, it’s not like that at all. Why
would I get scared for? And they say, ‘Well...you know...’ and I say, ‘The
only ones you have to be scared of are the ones that are walking around.’ Then
they say, ‘Do you ever see any spooky things?’ And I say, ‘No, I don’t see
spooky things.’ As an embalmer I ask people, ‘Do I look like death?’ and they say,
‘No.’” He summarises emphatically, “There you go – you don’t know who’s a funeral
director or an embalmer.” And Downey concurs. “When people find out what you do
they’ll either talk about it all night or distance themselves. People think you
carry death with you or that you’re unclean. They see the gory side. I’ve
stopped telling people what I do. I say I stack shelves at the Warehouse.”

It would be easy to think a person
might get hard-hearted seeing so much death on a frequent basis. Not everyone’s
passing is pleasant and not everyone’s ending is acknowledged. Embalmers can
never anticipate when a case will throw them an emotional curve ball. “The
people who I feel very sad for are the ones who have no service. It’s just
straight to the crematorium or straight into the ground. I find that sad
because, you know, these people were walking the earth and no one really cares.
We get a few cases like that and no one would ever think these people existed,”
Mahuika says. He looks down and studies his hands, quiet.

“When I first joined the industry I
used to drive the hearse. I would think to myself, ‘Whoa, look at all these
people walking ’round. Just think, one day they’re going to be lying in a
coffin.’ I used to think like that. But now I say, ‘Get on with it and live
life to the fullest’.”

Back upstairs in the mortuary he
places a protective hand on the embalming table where “his person” lies. This
is not a domain that most would find comfortable, but Mahuika, somewhat
ironically, thrives here. “I guess for me personally, I’ve had quite a bit of
grief in my life. I look upon it as, well, I know how people are feeling.
They’re grieving like hell. I think, ‘Here’s their loved one’. At the end of
the day I’m going to make this person beautiful because they were living,
breathing like us.” He looks around at
the tables, the tools, thoughtful in his approach. “I just want to make them
beautiful for the family and, hopefully, that will ease their grieving.”

(Please note - this was written as a university assignment piece in 2009 so the information has in all likelihood changed, as have the positions and opinions of people interviewed. It does remain however one of the most fascinating pieces I had the opportunity to write about and my thanks to Davis Funeral Homes at Dominion Road, Auckland for their openness and availability through the process.)

About Me

Latvia is a country far away from the one I call "home". This is a way for me to share the adventure I'm having with family, friends and anyone else who would like to join in. This is a land I'd never heard of until a short time ago but she is...amazing.